The mobile communication network is developing towards all-IP (ALL-IP). Internet protocol (IP, Internet Protocol) technologies will be applied to every layer of a mobile network. Therefore, more and more service types, such as mobile services, voice services, video services, network games services, and network browsing services, emerge on a current IP network (that is, a packet switched network), and bandwidth requirements also become higher and higher. In order to ensure that a large number of real-time services originally running on a time division multiplexing (TDM) network can run well on the IP network, complicated service classification needs to be performed on the IP network, and the processing procedures of IP switch equipments need to be simplified as much as possible, so as to improve the processing efficiency and quality of IP switch equipments.
In a communication equipment system such as a large-scale switch or router, a switched network is necessary for connecting different line cards and simplifying equipment architecture. The switched network and line cards constitute an integrated packet switched system that implements switch of data packets. Indexes of data switch include throughput, average cell (packet) delay, cell (packet) delay jitter, cell (packet) loss rate, blocking probability, and so on. Certainly, a good switch equipment enables the throughput to be close to 100% as much as possible, and enables the average cell (packet) delay, the cell (packet) delay jitter, the cell (packet) loss rate, and the blocking probability to be as low as possible.
A current switch equipment in the network (for example, a switch or a router with a switch function) generally adopts a virtual output queue (VOQ) for data switch. The VOQ is mainly used to perform classification and queuing on received packets according to destination addresses and priorities, and each input port sets a VOQ queue for each output port. FIG. 1 is the switch architecture of an existing switch equipment. An input end (that is, an ingress end) includes multiple VOQ queues corresponding to multiple switched paths from ingress ports to egress ports. An ingress port refers to a connection port of the input end and a switch fabric, and an egress port refers to a connection port of the switch fabric and an output end. The switch fabric (SF) includes a data switching matrix and a control switching matrix. The data switching matrix is configured to establish a switch channel for a received data stream, and the control switching matrix is configured to establish a switch channel for control information (for example, information such as a switch request, authorization and a queue status). A switch procedure is as follows. The ingress end finds out a switched path from an input port to an output port according to header information of a received data stream, and then transfers the data stream to the VOQ queue corresponding to the switched path. When it is time to switch the data stream, the ingress end requests the control switching matrix of the SF to establish a physical link for the switch of the data stream, and the ingress end sends a switch request message carrying a destination address to the output end (that is, an egress end) through the physical link. The egress end locally searches for queue information of an out queue (OQ) corresponding to the destination address in the switch request message according to the received switch request message, and when the OQ queue can still accommodate data, the egress end returns token information to the ingress end through the SF, allowing the ingress end to send the data stream to the egress end. When the token information reaches the SF, the data switching matrix of the SF establishes a physical channel for subsequent switch. After receiving the token information, the ingress end sends the data stream to the egress end through the physical channel established by the SF, and the egress end stores the received data in the OQ. When the data stream is scheduled, the egress end encapsulates the data in the OQ according to the above destination address, and then sends the data to a corresponding downstream equipment.
However, because the number of cells (or packets) from an upstream equipment and the number of packets reaching a certain port of the downstream equipment cannot be predicted, in the foregoing switch structure, a large number of buffers needs to be used to store VOQs and OQs in the ingress end and the egress end. In addition, the SF needs to prepare two switching matrixes for data switch and control information switch, and the ingress end and the egress end exchange messages through the SF to determine whether the data switch is allowed, so the entire switch procedure is too complicated, and a packet loss of the ingress end is easily caused. Moreover, a situation that multiple ingress ports send data to a same egress port at the same time easily occurs in the foregoing switch architecture, which results in blocking of the egress port.